Five ways to connect senior leaders and the workforce through better internal communication

We’re all familiar with Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the Emperor’s new clothes; a leader who thinks everything is fine and whose followers fail to point out anything to the contrary.

In the business world, this is not a ‘once upon a time’ fairy story. I often come across senior leaders who are out of touch with what really goes on at the coalface. Sycophantic or back-watching direct reports and multi-layer hierarchies are often to blame. But the biggest culprit of all is poor internal communication. The consequences for leaders, their people and the organisation can be severe: lack of alignment, mistrust, missed opportunities and wasted effort.

Encouragingly, research tells us that business performance improves when staff are heard and their feedback acted on – a key plank of internal communication. A Watson Wyatt study of 115 companies (2006, 2008) tells us that companies with highly engaged employees achieve financial performance four times greater than those with poor employee attitudes.

Here I highlight five successful internal communication solutions we’ve put in place over the years to drive open and candid dialogue between leaders and the workforce.

The elephant in the room

We often facilitate ‘elephants’ at conferences and events. We split participants into small groups and ask them each to discuss and pinpoint ‘the unspoken challenges that stop the organisation performing to its potential’. These are listed on Post-It notes or shared via iPads (without being attributed to individuals) and then prioritised for action planning. To stop the session turning in to a whinge fest, we add the caveat that ‘these must be things within our gift to solve’.

Good external facilitation helps reinforce that the process is truly anonymous and ensures that even politically charged content is surfaced. The resulting dialogue often creates genuine breakthroughs. With a large pharma we worked with some years ago, we uncovered some deep-seated issues relating to a merger that were subsequently addressed.

Royal visits

As senior leaders arrive for their tour of the building, introduce them to a cross-functional working party in a meeting room. This team are tasked with identifying and prioritising the barriers to business success locally and then creating five practical ways to improve performance. They do their thinking while the VIPs are being introduced to staff and the smell of new paint. As the tour ends, leaders hear the reflections and recommendations of the working party. Staff feel they are being heard and leaders get some concrete insights to act on.

Back to the floor

Senior leaders are charged with working at the sharp end of the business, usually for a week, not just a quiet afternoon. The aim is to arm them with real-life evidence, not distant observations, on which to base their decisions and plans. They undertake all of the duties of colleagues at the coalface (as long as that’s not a safety risk). We often suggest they are shadowed by a member of staff. Their insights can be recorded via video and edited for use as part of an internal communication campaign. I’ve seen priorities shifted and projects repurposed or even dropped as a consequence of this activity, for example the complete rewriting of a retail company’s training programme based on what the leader learned about the need.

Sounding boards

Sounding boards are representative groups of employees drawn from different functions, lengths of service and varying degrees of positivity vs. cynicism. In other words, a realistic cross-section of staff. We often put them in place during change programmes and leave them in place as the change becomes BAU.

Their task is to help shape how messages are positioned and delivered (not craft the actual messages themselves). Sounding boards provide excellent advice on how messages could be wrongly interpreted and provide recommendations on how to improve them.

Their feedback is shared with senior leaders, who might only be present at the top and tail of their meetings so participants can do their thinking in an unimpeded way, perhaps with the help of a facilitator. Participants often go on to become real advocates for the change programme. This is something we saw happen when we tried this approach at medical products company HARTMANN.

Apps to engage

The rise of digital, mobile and social media have converged to present great new opportunities to connect leaders and the workforce. I’m really excited about the impact these technologies can have on internal communication. Axiom is working on an app to measure engagement, pinpoint who understands what, gauge the mood of the business, and provide a direct line for two-way dialogue between leaders and the workforce. We think it will help boost performance, productivity, focus and retention of talent. If you want to get involved in the early work on this app and shape it to meet your needs, simply reach out.

Wrapping it up

Try these internal communication techniques and your leaders will be dressed for success – well placed to make well-informed decisions and deliver enhanced performance through a better engaged, informed and motivated workforce. But fail to connect with the workforce, and the business will suffer. And, like the Emperor in the fairy tale, leaders may be open to naked ridicule.

Energising event empowers participants to lead culture change

Lena Vågberg, VP of Quality Assurance at AstraZeneca, at the engagement event we ran for her global team

AstraZeneca is embedding quality deep into its approach to drug development – with help from Axiom.

We are working with the company’s Quality Assurance (QA) team on an engagement campaign designed to influence AstraZeneca employees worldwide to strive for the highest standards of quality management in everything they do.

The campaign launched in June with a one-day meeting that brought together more than 50 QA managers from around the world. Designed and facilitated by Axiom, the high-energy event saw participants commit to becoming advocates for the quality mission. It included a range of activities to help participants develop the mindset and skills to influence stakeholders around AstraZeneca.

Audience interaction tech

The event made extensive use of audience interaction technology to generate frank dialogue and spark new thinking. We issued participants with iPads so they could register their views, ideas and questions throughout the event and contribute to large-scale brainstorming, problem solving and action planning. All participants left having committed to three actions to implement back in the workplace.

In post-event feedback, participants gave an average rating of nine out of 10 for the event. The average rating for Axiom’s facilitation was 9.5 and the use of interactive technology rated 9.6.

Participant comments included:

“Great opportunities to establish new relationships. High energy and enthusiasm. Feels like we are on a shared and exciting journey.”

‘Working wonders’

Our client, Lena Vågberg, VP of Quality Assurance at AstraZeneca, was equally impressed. She says: “I am amazed by the huge difference Lorna, Chris and the Axiom team have made. They worked wonders to support us every step of the way and ensure the event was the absolute best and most powerful we could ask for.

“We now feel full of energy, equipped with the right tools and eager to get moving.”

In the lead-up to the event, we carried out interviews with a sample of QA staff to uncover their views. We were then able to work with the senior team in QA to co-create clear, consistent and compelling messages to take to the rest of AstraZeneca. We brought these messages together in a ‘manifesto’ that provides the basis for the whole communication campaign, including the launch event.

Five tips for designing and delivering conferences that move middle management minds

I’ve always been struck by the gulf between the aspirations of senior leaders, as discussed in the boardroom, and the concrete reality of what people really think, say and do, day in and day out, on the factory, office or shop floor. Indeed, that’s what got me involved in employee engagement in the first place, over 25 years ago.

In internal communications, as on the tube in London, the cry is often the same: “Mind the gap”. And who is sitting right in the middle of this gap in most organisations? More often than not, it’s your middle and line managers. To get your workforce engaged in delivering the strategy that’s been drawn up (or at least agreed) at the boardoom table, you need to fire your middle managers with enthusiasm.

Despite advances in new digital channels, direct communication from middle and line managers is still the most influential channel for the people they lead. People pay real attention to what their immediate boss says and does, so you need to get those bosses saying and doing the right things – acting as role models not ‘well poisoners’ or ‘energy thieves’. Get your line managers to act as advocates for your strategy and, through their actions, you can inspire the entire workforce. But fail to get them onside and they will do a lot of damage, passively or otherwise.

One of the best forums to connect with and win over middle managers is at conferences and other live events. Here are five tips for doing just that.

1. Create compelling messages

To begin with, you need a set of clear, concise and compelling messages that you want the entire organisation to understand and act on. That will give you a consistent foundation upon which line managers can add their local information. We often describe it as one company song for which there can be a number of arrangements depending on the needs of discrete audiences.

We use the word ‘participant’ deliberately. You don’t want ‘attendees’ or ‘delegates’ at your event, you want participants; you want your line managers interacting with your strategy and plans, being inspired by them, owning them and ultimately of course being advocates for them.

We urge you to share your vision for the future of your organisation, then give your audience a chance to check their understanding of it through carefully facilitated interactivity. You want to know what they liked about what they just heard, what was inspiring, what questions they have about making it happen and what might be challenging.

Then get participants truly collaborating to create pragmatic ways forward to overcome the challenges and help execute the strategy and plans in their part of the organisation. Get them thinking about the behaviours they’ll need to exhibit to model the way forward with their teams – and identify the behaviours that won’t work and need to be consigned to history.

Using it we can quickly get instant feedback from the audience, capture their comments, anonymously if that helps, log and respond to their questions, prioritise ideas, even measure the success of the event – all live.

It’s amazing how much you can accomplish using the collaborative tools. And participants love it, modern tech for a modern, forward-thinking employer.

And post-event we can email individual actions plans and notes, created at the event, back to participants and send a ‘digital copy’ of the entire event to leaders as a Word doc or spreadsheet. Oh, and no one has to type up any flipcharts!

5. Help managers bring the baton home

As your event comes to a close, and while your line managers are all fired up, give them some engagement skills development and get them practising how to share the buzz of event with their teams back in the workplace.

We think the success of any leadership event should be felt months after it has ended – by people who didn’t even attend, the people your line managers need to inspire, the people who will ultimately deliver your strategies and plans. The conference presentations may have finished, but the task of inspiring the entire workforce has just begun.

For us, that often means co-creating ‘cascade packs’ that will help line managers thrive in their role of bringing your messages to life in their part of the organisation. Stapled copies of some slides just don’t cut it these days!

Indeed, you should be super clear at the outset about the role of participants in cascading messages from the events. Maybe even share how you are going to measure the success of the cascade – that often gets people sitting up straight and licking the end of their pencils from the word go!

As facilitator, I often ask which part of their salary participants want to give back if they don’t think that inspiring their direct reports is part of their job! Their role, like yours as communicators and leaders, is to close the gap between rhetoric and day-to-day reality.

So do use your conferences and events to fire your middle and line managers with enthusiasm. And if the well poisioners really don’t want to get on board, maybe in some cases you might need to fire them full stop (whether you do it with enthusiasm is up to you – but of course you must always do it with the full support of your HR team!)

At the most recent PR Week internal comms shindig, there was a lot of talk about the measurable value of video. Because it’s now so easy to track views, comments and likes when a video gets published on the intranet, it’s an attractive channel for those under pressure (rightly so) to demonstrate the impact of their comms tactics.

Yet most of us instinctively know that face-to-face events are a more powerful intervention. What if we could find ways to more reliably measure the impact of events? Surely this would help us restore face-to-face in its true place as the channel of choice. [Read more…]

The future for employee engagement events is all about getting participants connecting, contributing and collaborating.

More than 20 years ago and for many years on the bounce, I could confidently predict the future of employee engagement events – well at least the formulaic and uninspiring annual management conferences at the retailer I worked for at the time.

To the musical accompaniment of something current – probably Dire Straits or Billy Ocean – we were presented with the year’s highs and lows, told about the store opening programme (those were the days when the big retailers were opening stores not closing them!), walked slowly through the balance sheet and exhorted to get behind the best Christmas special offers we’ve ever had since… well, the same time last year. Then there would be an announcement of this year’s Christmas performance bonus, which was of course rarely attainable by most attendees.

(I say “attendees” deliberately because we were never really participants – at least not until the comedian came on and sent us all home with a smile on our faces. Which was usually all we went home with, except a tear and beer-stained envelope which contained the bonus details – no cascade packs for us to rally the troops in store, oh no.)

You see, I really could predict the future of my employer’s events – and I wonder if any of your colleagues can do the same about your events?

Since those long ago days, and after the MD challenged me to put my money where my mouth was and do better, I’ve made it my business to be an advocate for truly engaging and interactive events that put participants, and the difference they need to make to company performance, at the heart of everything.

Of course, before you get into building in interactivity, there’s a lot of foundational work to do – being clear about your purpose, deciding who to invite and finding a venue. And then you need to design the whole conference experience. This is best done in what we call a ‘walk through’ that describes the entire event through the eyes of a participant. The walk-through adds detail: purpose, invite ideas, key content (to avoid underlaps and overlaps), staging instructions, excitement, emotion, competitions, cascade plans and of course… interactivity.

For instance, participants might have to complete a personal profile, highlight their hopes and fears and provide some quirky insights about themselves as part of the registration process. You could display the information in printed posters in the registration area and challenge participants to pick out themes from the profiles or answer quiz questions about each other. Or you could load up the profiles to interactive devices such as iPads that you give to participants on arrival.

In this regard, we often partner with Crystal Interactive, specialists in audience interaction technology. We might get Crystal to create bespoke digital content for participants on arrival – the agenda, speaker profiles, venue maps and break-out session options.

Thereafter, we make extensive use of Crystal’s interactive solutions throughout the main body of the event. Typically, that involves giving participants access to apps that make it easy to share their views, ideas and questions and message one another (and leaders) in real-time during the event. We’ve made extensive use of this kind of audience-engagement technology over the last few years. It’s great for large-scale brainstorming, prioritizing, problem solving, gamification and action planning at organisational, team and personal levels.

All the data captured goes into a database and is made available after the event – and no one has to write up any flipcharts. The tech will even email you your actions, cc your boss.

In essence pretty much anything you can think of that used to be done with flipcharts, Post-its and brown paper rolls can be delivered by Crystal – but so much quicker, enabling you to cover more ground than you ever thought possible.

Keeping it real

These technical solutions are very powerful indeed, but it’s important to make sure participants also interact face to face and have an experience beyond a little rectangular screen. So we build in lots of opportunities for talking things through with leaders and peers in plenary and breakout sessions. We also feature hands-on activities – anything from building the business ‘model’ with Lego to making videos to going on treasure hunts.

And interactivity shouldn’t stop when the spotlights at the venue go out. That’s when we should be turning the spotlight on the people who couldn’t come to the event – often those at the sharp end executing the strategy day to day. The challenge is to bring the key messages to life in their part of the world. Take some of the interactive elements of your conference back to the workplace, launch a competition, generate dialogue between leaders and the line on the hot topics of the day. The aim is to transfer the buzz of the conference room floor to the office or factory floor.

Predicting the future

So that’s a flavour of what we’re doing today to make events truly engaging. And what else might we be doing in the next few years?

Well, we’ll still need to fulfil the basic human need to meet face to face – especially when there’s a big change to get started. What will change will be the level of interactivity opened up by emerging technologies:

Better and faster streaming will allow content to be shared globally beyond the conference floor – and both ways too.

Facilitators could use Google Glass-type devices to see and respond to participant feedback live.

Facial recognition will be able to send participants profiles of people they’re looking at, and flag when they are near someone they want to meet.

Wearable tech could be used to measure physical responses to specific pieces of content – including levels of engagement. Wristwatches could be used to quickly and accurately register a vote by the raise of a hand, or to signal the extent of acceptance of an idea by the speed of a wave.

Technology will turn any piece of paper into instantly shareable whiteboards

Auto-translate technology will take care of the language barrier in events for international participants.

Augmented reality and 3D tech will literally bring key messages to life. Imagine an event where a list of potential actions would appear in front of participants in 3D and they can prioritise them with their eye movements, share them with double blink and like with a nod or a smile.

So I predict an exciting time ahead for employee engagement conferences and events – so long as we stay focused on the objectives of the communication and look to achieve them with a healthy balance of ‘traditional’ interactivity and new technology.

And what about your next conference? What steps are you going to take to truly engage your people and deliver an experience that is anything but predictable?

The future of audience interaction

Communicators from across the UK and Europe got to experience the future of audience interaction when they took part in a breakout session run by Axiom and our partners at Crystal Interactive.

Appearing at the PRWeek 10th Annual Internal Communications conference in London, Axiom’s Chris Carey and Crystal’s Chris Elmitt showcased new technologies for engaging audiences and promoting real-time collaboration at live and interactive events. We did this by getting the communicators attending the session to experience the power of these new technologies for themselves.

Steering a virtual cycling team to success!

More than 50 communications professionals managed to coordinate their efforts to steer a virtual cycling team to success in a multi-player game with Axiom founder Chris Carey in the role of team manager.

Attendees at the Innovating Interaction event hosted by Axiom partner firm Crystal Interactive used their iPads in unison to play the game. The app monitored delegates’ collective decisions and Chris helped them use the feedback to improve their performance.

This was just one of the highlights of Crystal’s showcase of the latest audience engagement technology.

In addition, delegates got to try out a new conference app that can turn delegate input into instant infographics.

They also took part in a ‘hackathon’ – a collective brainstorm on iPads – to come up with ideas to improve the UK’s transport infrastructure. They generated more than 90 ideas and the facilitator then helped the audience identify and refine the best ideas – all in under seven minutes.

The laptop battery finally conked out on my flight to Gothenburg and I turned to the in-flight mag

Once I got past the reviews of all the great places I wouldn’t get time to visit, I got to the business section and my eye was caught by some stats about telephone meetings attributed to Kevan Hall’s book Speed Lead.

Apparently, a lowly 23% of participants say they give their full attention. On top of that, 27% do other work while supposedly taking part, 13% surf the web and 8% are not even fully dressed! Does any of that sound familiar? (By the way, the full findings are on AV provider IVCi’s website – with thanks to Neville Eden who pointed me to them.)

All this got me thinking that few of us have ever been taught to run face to face meetings, let alone virtual meetings such as telephone conferences.[Read more…]